By examining families with a single autistic child, researchers have identified a gene that is critical for humans to recognize one another. Learn more...

When mice don’t produce the hormone oxytocin or its receptor, they lose the
ability to recognize other familiar mice by their smell. Although humans
use other means for identifying one another, researchers have hypothesized
that oxytocin plays a role in human recognition as well. Now researchers at
Emory University, along with an interdisciplinary team of scientists from
University College London, Finland’s University of Tampere, and Germany’s
Max Planck Institute, report links between a particular single nucleotide
polymorphisms (SNP) in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and social
recognition abilities in members of 198 families with a single autistic
child (1).

“One feature of autism is that there is a disruption in some aspect of social
cognition,” said Larry
Young, Director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience at Emory
University. “We chose families who had members with autism because we know
that, across the whole group, there is a wide range of variability in social
cognitive function.”

The researchers tested members of these families for facial recognition
memory, emotional discrimination, and gaze detection and then looked at
polymorphisms in the OXTR gene. None of the SNPs they found were linked to
autism, but the group found one SNP, the rs237887 variant, that was strongly
associated with facial recognition memory the individuals with autism as
well as their family members.

“To me, this is really cool because we have previously shown that mice with a
complete deletion of this gene can’t remember other mice,” he said. “But
mice don’t use face recognition memory. They use olfactory recognition; they
tell each other apart by smell. And this suggests that oxytocin is affecting
some kind of common process across man and mouse when it comes to social
recognition even though different sensory modalities are being used.”

Young argued that this provides further evidence that oxytocin is not a
“cuddle chemical,” as it is often called since it is the chemical
responsible for the formation of monogamous bonds, but rather a single
molecule that makes social stimuli more salient in both mice and men.

“We think oxytocin helps the brain pay more attention to the fine details in
social situations,” he said. “And what this study suggests is that OXTR is
involved in a very fundamental smaller process of social recognition.”